Duane Red Bird, age 39: Died Jan. 5. Suspect apprehended on scene, arrested Jan. 6. Bakita Mohammed, age 24: Died April 30. Suspect arrested that day. Michael James Stevens, age 19: Died Dec. 30. Suspect arrested Jan. 10, 2010.** * Attempted robbery suspects, later charged with murder as accessories, arrested Dec. 5** Murder cases in Sioux Falls city limits for which SFPD was not the lead investigating agency

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It’s been a week since Kari Ann Kirkegaard was seen alive, and police still don’t know who’s responsible for her death.

That’s unusual for a Sioux Falls homicide, but not without precedent.

Seven times in the past five years, three days or more have passed between the victim’s death and the arrest of a murder suspect. It took almost two years for an arrest warrant to be issued in one of them. Another, from 2011, remains unsolved.

Kirkegaard’s death has some commonalities with other hard-to-solve cases. Her body was not found right away, no eyewitnesses have come forward, and there are no obvious reasons someone would have wanted her dead.

“Sometimes, these things fall together fairly quickly, but other times it takes awhile to get all the pieces in place and make an arrest,” Police Chief Doug Barthel said Friday. “We’ll continue to investigate this until we have what we need. … It’s very rare that we have a case that goes unsolved.”

Police think the 56-year-old cancer survivor and single mother was killed in her Garfield Avenue home on March 15, the day before family members found her body in her bathtub.

The best evidence police have gone public with is low-quality surveillance video, which shows a man carrying something, then leaving empty-handed seconds later. Police say more surveillance footage, which they have not made public, shows the man entering the picture on a bicycle late Friday or early Saturday and then leaving in Kirkegaard’s 1998 dark blue Ford Explorer. He later returned the SUV and rode away on the bicycle shortly before sunrise.

“The individual in the video, we believe, is directly involved and or responsible for the death of Kari,” Capt. Greg VandeKamp said Thursday.

Tips coming in

The police department’s Crime Stoppers tip line had produced 20 to 30 leads by Friday morning. They included information about the bicycle, bedding that was missing from Kirkegaard’s home, and locations the victim’s SUV was seen the morning of the homicide.

Police haven’t named a suspect. They’re urging people to watch the surveillance video to see if they recognize the man, whether by his gait or medium build or the fact that he was riding a bicycle on a cool night.

Parallels with long investigations

Of the 25 homicides that took place between 2009 and 2013, most were closed the day of the crime.

In 13, the suspect was apprehended the same day, at or near the scene. Three cases were murder-suicide. One, the killing of a homeless man named Robert Thunder Hawk, was reported by one of the men involved in the killing.

Two of the cases with quick arrests involved the death of a young child, and the caregivers later charged with murder were on scene and cooperated with police.

Of the remaining cases, seven took three days or longer to reach an arrest.

In cases where the investigation takes several days, police often are relying on witnesses or friends and acquaintances of suspects, who often won’t cooperate right away.

“It’s uncommon that you’ll have an eyewitness to a case that can get you to an arrest within 24 or 48 hours,” said Ryan Sage, a Minnehaha County deputy state’s attorney. “It’s about tracking the leads and getting a case built before we make that arrest.”

The other unsolved case in Sioux Falls involved an uncooperative victim. George Eastman was stabbed in August 2011 and spent several months in the hospital before dying from complications of his injuries. He refused to speak to police on multiple occasions.

Lag in discovery

The first homicide of last year involved the late discovery of the victim’s body, similar to Kirkegaard’s situation.

Crescencio Conde-Vargas was found by co-workers concerned for his well-being. Police tracked those who’d seen him, spoke with friends of the suspect and used phone records to find the man who was later charged in his death, Robert Cornelius Bass III.

Michael James Stevens, whose death isn’t counted among Sioux Falls homicide statistics because he was killed in county jurisdiction at the Sioux Empire Fairgrounds, was dead and slumped over the wheel of his car with a shotgun wound for four days before being discovered by a fairgrounds employee.

By then, his killer had fled to Milford, Iowa. Investigators spoke with friends of Stevens and the suspect’s girlfriend before traveling to and searching through trash in the small Iowa town to track down and arrest Samuel Blue Lint. Lint is now serving a life sentence for Stevens’ murder.

Curtis Weddell, a Wagner native who beat a Sioux Falls man named Rafael Morales to death in 2010, was on the run for several days as police dealt with two suspects who lied about what had happened the night of the murder.

Those two witnesses later were charged with misprision of a felony. Weddell is serving 60 years for manslaughter.

Building a case

In some situations, police and prosecutors think they know who’s committed a crime but don’t have the evidence to make an arrest.

Howard Paul Allen was stabbed 37 times in late 2010 by Letisha Morgan, whose ID card was found near the scene. She was interviewed, but there wasn’t enough evidence right away to tie her to the murder.

Allen’s case was classified as unsolved until Morgan was interviewed in Texas in 2012 in connection with a separate murder and confessed to the Sioux Falls killing.

“We may have enough evidence for us to have confidence in our conclusions, but being able to prove it is a different thing,” Chief Barthel said Friday.

Barthel said prosecutors are brought in early in the investigations of homicides and other serious felonies.

“Especially in a case like (the Kirkegaard homicide), we want to make sure we’ve got a solid case,” Barthel said.

Two cases in the past five years have resulted in dismissal based on evidentiary issues. Dustin Samuel Two Bulls Sr. was released from jail after spending almost a year there awaiting trial in the death of 1-year-old Deryun Wilson. A judge ruled that medical testimony about “shaken baby syndrome” would be inadmissible at his trial, and Two Bulls never made admissions about hurting the child.

Cora Lynn McBride, charged in the 2009 death of Duane Red Bird, was released after a judge decided before the trial that her confession had been coerced.

Kirkegaard case

Investigators are combing through Kirkegaard’s SUV for evidence and deciding what to send to Pierre for further analysis, Clemens said.

As for the surveillance video, Clemens said it’s hard to tell what type of bicycle the suspect was riding when he arrived in the neighborhood.

The Ford Explorer has a No. 15 decal on the lower left side of the rear window. Investigators are asking people who saw the vehicle — or a man riding a bicycle — in the early morning hours of Saturday to contact police. Police say the suspect returned the vehicle to Kirkegaard’s driveway after going to an unknown location.

Kirkegaard’s cause of death hasn’t been released, but the family members who discovered her called it in as a drowning. Kirkegaard was discovered in her bathtub with the water running after family members became concerned when she didn’t respond to text messages and phone calls. She was last seen alive Friday evening.